Illustration by David Cutler

I am beginning to forget things about the island where I once lived, and the remote house on a dirt road where I spent two winters more than 25 years ago. I'm not sure anymore how long the ferry ride from the mainland was, or when the scallop season started. I've lost the names of acquaintances. But the one thing I'll never forget is the night sky above my home those winter nights, which I anticipated as I drove out of town with its bright clusters of shop windows and then outdistanced the last of the streetlights.

Beyond their glare the road narrowed and the human lights grew more and more sparse until, when I turned down my rutted road, my own headlights were all I had to orient me in the dark. Once I arrived home and turned them off, I often couldn't see my hand in front of my face, certainly not when the moon was down. I always was aware of the phases of the moon then. There would be more stars than dark, just as Chekhov once wrote -- so many stars one could not have put a finger in between them -- and they seemed close enough to reach up and touch. Even so, I didn't have to look skyward to feel their presence. I sensed their weight -- that's the only way I can describe it -- a kind of pressure bearing down on me.

As much as I tried, I found it almost impossible to stand and ponder them for long, for as beautiful as they were, they also made me apprehensive. Part of that may have been my own young solitary self in that remote corner. It may have been the cold and the wind. All I know is that I encountered those stars each time with mixed feelings of awe and loneliness, and often I hastened to feel for my keys and then the lock on the door. Once I moved inside, I saw to everything that would cut me off from the outer night -- the lights, the fire, the radio, supper -- the small tasks that people turn to so as to make themselves at home.

Still, the feeling I had beneath the stars lingered long into the evening. How must it have been for so much of human time when people had almost no way to take cover from the night -- no more than a smoky fire or a lone candle that at its best also smoked, and stank, and lit only a meal, a face, a hand? Not much to do after a while but talk on in the dark, and then sleep.

Now I live in the heart of a modest town, so, like most people in this country, I don't see many stars anymore, and the sky between them isn't really dark. The streetlights outside my windows are so bright I can wander through my house without turning on a lamp. I see illuminated windows in every direction; the neighborhood forms its own constellation of far, near, bright, dim, upstairs, downstairs, which carries its own kind of beauty. When I walk through the streets at night I notice the moon above the windows and street lamps, and can sometimes spy a planet or a major constellation -- Orion, Cassiopeia -- more easily than I ever could before. The sparse stars feel familiar, part of the neighborhood, although they seem much farther away than they did on the island, and I never feel the pressure of them.

Sometimes I try to imagine the night sky I once knew shining above the town, as if starlight and human light could coexist with equal strength. But even if that were possible, I don't suppose the night sky would conjure the tumult of feeling that rose up within me all those years ago. Abundant artificial light creates a different kind of night for the human spirit, one in which it's a simple thing to travel through the dark, and which can be full of leisure or as full of direction as day. As the dusk draws down, I merely have to flick a switch to continue with my work, and I only have to look out the window to feel the company of others doing the same.

The star-struck sky belongs to a spare world, unbounded and without distraction, where it's never a simple thing to take cover from the night, where every attempt to do so is small and self-conscious. Perhaps it's age and experience that make it so, or the rarity of it, but when I chance to see such a sky now -- atop a mountain, along a deserted stretch of coast -- it feels like a privilege as I fall through the years toward ancient time.